Tuesday, 28 November 2017

How not to clean pictures: the risk of gels

An
art dealer has taken down the video nasty of this picture being
scrubbed 'clean' with a harsh brush while gel drips across the cleaned
area. You can still see it here as of today. The American Institute for Conservation issued a critical statement and conservators were furious. I don't know who was cleaning the picture, but a conservator on social media calls him 'Scrubby Jelly Pants'.
The vigorous scraping with a harsh brush is horrifying, and obviously
risks damage. We'll never know how much harm was done; working that
quickly makes assessment impossible. In the image above the uncleaned
eyebrow looks clearer than the cleaned one, despite the varnish. Of
course it's possible that it's an effect of light or they were touched
up by a later restorer, but the most likely explanation is damage to the
original paint. But although the risk of mechanical abrasion is
obvious, my concern here is with the relatively new use of gels in
conservation.

Gels allow better control of solvents,
restricting penetration. Conservators worry that residues could continue
to act on painting long after the restoration, but extensive research
suggests that the risk is low. My concern is slightly different: it's
that new techniques encourage over-confidence. The defence of Scrubby
Jelly Pants has been to assert that gels can be tailored to remove only
varnish. Bullish conservators have always claimed only to remove
varnish; no one wants to say they're removing original paint. But it's
just not true. There's always a risk of removing original paint,
particularly when it's applied as glazes that might be made of pigment
suspended in varnish. Gels are not magic, and cleaning pictures is not
an exact science.

Psychologists speculate that we have a
'risk budget', so we respond to new safety measures by taking more risk.
Make us wear seatbelts, and we'll drive faster. The other risk is that
new techniques are over-sold. There's a mountain of research on the
benefits and uses of gels in conservation, but none of it says you can
mix a Magic Gel that can be safely slavered over a picture and scrubbed
away without risk. One of the main benefits of gels is the controlled
application of solvent; in this video it is so thin it runs down the
surface. If it were truly the case that the solvent can only dissolve
varnish, and not affect underlying paint, it would not be necessary to
apply it in a controlled way. The whole point of gels is to mitigate
that risk.

The Hippocratic Oath - "first, do no
harm" - is not appropriate in conservation. It would mean doing nothing.
Old pictures, unlike people, do not heal or regenerate. Over time we
can only ever have less of the original artwork. The challenge is to
minimise the damage and weigh it against the benefits. Conservation is
essential and desirable; a great masterpiece hidden behind dirt and
varnish can't be enjoyed by anyone. But the idea of doing irreversible
damage to irreplaceable art is horrifying, so the temptation is to deny
the trade-off. I recently heard the leader of a major conservation
project assert that there was 'no risk' involved. That either
misunderstands risk, or mistrusts her audience to understand the
trade-off.

Conservation has become highly
professionalised and sophisticated. Good conservators use artistic
knowledge and skill in the application of advanced scientific techniques
that are extensively tested and debated. But their work is not widely
appreciated outside the field. There ought to be a better quality debate
about the costs and benefits of conservation projects, rather than spin
about 'zero risk, all benefit'. The failure to have that debate is part
of what creates the space for videos like this to go viral, and for bad
conservation techniques to thrive.

5 comments:

The scraping sound effects in the video are especially horrifying. Also, one of our favorite paintings was produced in the 1960's with bright colors intentionally toned down by streaked and dark varnish. This technique would utterly ruin such a painting.--Jim

That amateurish division between "original paint" and "varnish" deserves painful whipping. Paintings, up till alla prima art of XX century were consisting of alternating opacities with delicate films of glazes.Glazes have rosins in them and to remove them is worst than barbaric. There is an unsavory list of reasons why those delicacies are removed, scrubbed away.XX century aesthetics hate tertiary colors, subtlety and charms of refinement is as foreign to them as Brahms' violin concerto would be to subhuman rapper. Those "conservationists" are savage vandals and should find employment for their impatient fingers by removal of "urban graphitti" from NYC or Chicago transit cars.I am not taken by this new enamouration with gels- it remains that the homicidal goal is to "enliven", to bring some much needed zing to those old paintings. If we can make them look a bit closer to Finger paint, to Crayola key of colors-then may be we let them stay at the museums.

I totally agree. Tranparancy is essential. Yesterday I went to a lecture on the conservation of a large Memling from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. The whole project took 16 (!) years. I'm confident this was done in a proper way... Lizet Klaassen and her colleagues did a wonderfull job although she explicitly said that conservation/restoration is "bad for a painting". It's a pitty we can't admire the result before 2019...

In the early 1990s I remember seeing a portrait that had been repatriated to Spain and was now on display in the Prado. It was covered in old varnish, and when I asked why it had not yet been 'cleaned', the reply was simple:"That is the original varnish, applied by Goya." Today's conservation is tomorrow's restoration.